In church this morning (I know…my blogs have never started with these words…bear with me, please), the pastor gave a sermon on imperfection, greed, and dishonesty; on the impossible world we live in and how difficult it can be to do the right thing and how sometimes doing the wrong thing isn’t always such a bad thing (apparently Jesus did it, too). Now I don’t go to church often, and I’m currently in a stage where I’m deciding whether church is the right place for me right now, but today it was like the sermon had been hand-crafted for me and where I’ve been these last few weeks.
Since I turned 25, I’ve been on a bit of a spiritual journey. Something about hitting that number made me realize I needed to have more to my life than stories about foggy Saturday nights spent with too much wine and I’m-not-sure-what-his-name-was-but-he-made-me-laugh.
So for the last few years I’ve attempted (strong emphasis to be placed on the word attempt) to begin making healthy-life-choices, like “I really shouldn’t smoke that cigarette, even though I’ve had enough booze to sink a ship” or, “I should totally get the garden salad WITH the cheeseburger ”. "Does running away from the police count as exercise?" Or, “No, I really need to pass on the birthday cake. I’ve had three donuts for breakfast already.” Somehow, I feel these choices redeem the thousands of bad ones I’ve made since I turned 18. I get the salad dressing on the side, don’t I!?
In line with such healthy living, I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that I should find a spiritual community, too (which is not to say that when my girls and I have had enough to drink that we aren’t about as spiritual as it gets), but I'm talking about a community that can help me continue to make these healthy choices. And I can’t lie that I have another reason for seeking a church community: maybe I’ll find a nice young, independently wealthy church-going man who likes children, folk art, and wine and who wants to let me volunteer professionally and sit on committees and boards for the rest of my life and spend all of our winters in Africa (Jesus made wine out of water, people, have some faith).
I’ve been church-hopping for a few years now and I've struggled to find just the right congregation for me—somewhere that feels comfortable, and safe. Somewhere that supports my diverse lifestyle, and the lifestyles of my loved ones (read: a lot of my friends are really, really gay and I really, really love them and really, really lack the tolerance I need to be around people who are intolerant), and a church that focuses on peace-making and justice. And that's not to say that I haven't found churches that I like. I’ll find a place that seems nice enough, but beyond a powerful sermon or two, I find there’s really no one like me there—someone who believes the same things I believe and who even begins to understand what I do for a living (which I can totally understand, because I can barely explain it myself).
Partially, I wonder if this lack of church success is because I can’t seem to decide what I actually believe these days. And despite everything I’ve seen, and everything I’ve done, I feel like I’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what exists out there for me. So church has been low on the totem pole. And it doesn’t help when there are crazies out there burning religious texts in the name of “God”. I know they’re only about 40 people deep, but 40 people deep too many, I think.
These last few weeks have been challenging and exhausting and at times, painful. I’ve been working impossible hours and facing pretty impossible to-do lists for just one person. I truly love my job, but there are weeks when there are never enough hours and certainly not enough hands to actually get what we need done.
A pretty horrible tragedy happened last week, too. One of my dearest friends and colleagues L. lost a close friend, C., suddenly and tragically, at the hands of a domestic dispute. Though I didn’t know C. well, I had met her a few times through L. and I can’t help but feel devastated by the loss, not to mention the loss for this woman’s children, family and friends. Domestic disputes should never lead to the death of two parents—regardless of who was responsible. It’s eerie to hear the news and know the people that they’re talking about. One would think that I'd become immune to the tragedy of everyday life, when you deal with it as much as we in Baltimore City do, but it never stops hurting. Or stinging. Or biting. It forces you to pause and take a deep breath, even when you haven’t allotted that pause and deep breath into your schedule for the day.
Death is never something we’re truly prepared for, and even when we know it’s coming, it stings hard and shuts down life temporarily (and sometimes a bit longer than temporarily). I know because I’ve grieved for friends and grandparents, students and mentors. I’ve felt the sting. The sinking stomach. The numbness. I started writing this blog about this time last year because my grandmother was dying. I used this space, and you, my readers, as a way to cope with what didn’t make sense. And in the process, I rediscovered a voice I’d lost over the last few years of academic writing and grant writing and all the writing that had nothing to do with me.
And a year later, I’m still using this space to process the things that don’t make sense and to celebrate the things that work and to share the things that don’t work. And this public stage is refreshingly raw and revealing. There are times where I hesitate to write what I’m thinking because I wonder how it will be received, or who might read it, but I generally push forward and think, “if not now, when?” And what is it that causes the hesitation? What kind of super human expectations do we have on ourselves if we can’t be true to ourselves? If we can’t be honest with our friends and families about our stories?
I’ve written a lot about expectations in the past—expectations that sometimes feel unfair and that confuse me and that overwhelm me. Expectations that cause me to wake up at four in the morning and pace and write emails (and sometimes online shoe shop or bake muffins). Expectations that we women weren’t told about when we were whispered stories by our mothers about someday being Wonderwoman. The things they didn’t tell us when they taught us to idolize the suffragists and to become good feminists—to raise the bar for ourselves and to destroy the glass ceiling. I mean, I almost hesitate to compare our lives now, as modern women, to the lives of women one hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, but I can’t help but wonder if the expectations now are almost too high.
The things we women are expected to want to do—don’t you want to pump your breast milk with your automated breast pump in your $600 tailored suit in between meetings? Don’t you want to be expected to want children but to also want a career, too? Don’t you want to have the burden of figuring out how to fit it all in—the growing up, the going to graduate school, the finding of someone who isn’t a total freak and/or apeshit NUTS that you actually want to share a life with (and then the follow-up dating that needs to happen), the marriage (the planning), the birthing of babies, and then the subsequent raising of said babies, while not giving up on the education you spent $200,000 on (okay, you, your parents, that bitch Sallie Mae, and the federal government)? Don’t you want to have a conference call on your iPhone while you’re waiting in the carpool line? And we're supposed to do this in high heels, something gracefully feminine, without ever looking tired, and without ever falling victim to the all-day-yoga-pants and arch-supportive-shoe. Or without going into debt. Or without getting too fat.
These last few weeks I’ve been running around at breakneck speed, zooming in and out of meetings, eating lunches out of plastic wrappers, working fourteen, fifteen hour days and planning every minute of my day, down to the exactly three times I’ve allowed myself to pee. My dog has been so mad at me that she pooped in the house twice last week (and I admit, I’m jealous that I too can’t take out my anger by pooping in the middle of someone’s floor) and she keeps giving me this look that screams, “go ahead and leave again. I’ll just be here at the house. Doing absolutely nothing while you’re gone. All day.” My Blackberry has become my best friend. My confidant. And my accomplice to this messy lifestyle. She never leaves my side, even when she's been silenced. Sometimes her little red blinking light is like my very own personal lighthouse.
And a part of me feels so accomplished when I survive these weeks. This is, in part, what they wanted, I think. This is what those women, for so many years, fought tooth and nail, so that I could run around with a Blackberry, saying the things I’m supposed to say in meetings, looking the look, with that ease that says, “oh hey, yeah, I made these muffins from scatch at three a.m. when I couldn’t sleep.” I’ve conquered not only one domain—but TWO. I can work AND bake. Hand me a breast pump. I’m a modern superwoman.
But theres the part of me that hates it too, and hates what it does to me. The me who doesn't ever want to be like the women in Sex and the City or the women in a bad Bravo reality series. The me that hates that we're expected to pull all this off; to be smart and feminine, sexy and maternal, nurturing and understanding, successful and yet, still simple, and low-maintenance.
But then when we're forced to pause, when the cycle gets disrupted, we're allowed a finite window of time in which we can really evaluate our lives. We can challenge our own truths and be critical of ourselves: Am I doing the things that make me happy? Am I doing the things that fulfull me? That enrich me? That propel me forward?
This morning we talked about a parable in Luke that deals with a shrewd manager and a greedy landowner. The sermon went deep into the story, theorizing all the ways it could be interpreted, but more importantly, discussing the many, many ways in which our world is imperfect. That we’re guided towards choosing wealth and greed because we’re supposed to advance ourselves and grow our bank accounts and 401Ks and become someone. But that Jesus tells us that we need to get in the habit of making choices for the good, even when what’s good doesn’t seem clear. This, of course, led us to a discussion about how to even know, or understand, what good and bad means anymore. The many, many ways in which we’re expected to make smart choices when there actually aren’t always smart choices to be had among the handful of choices we’re usually being asked to decide between. We make the best choices we can, with the best of intentions, and hope that we’ve done the right thing. And ideally, the take-home message for someone like me is that the expectations I’ve put on myself for anything above and beyond just doing the right thing shouldn’t consume me anymore.
I laughed inside because I’ve spent so much time convincing myself that there is no place for me at church, and here I am, at church, feeling like the sermon was written for me. Feeling like the sermon was written for C. and for all the women around me who are expected to accomplish the impossible, everyday. For all of us who keep ourselves awake at night, worried that someone will punish us for having made the best choice out of the choices we were given, even though it might have been the wrong choice. That someone will pull the tablecloth out from under us and surprise us with a mandated "stay-at-home-and-bake" day and secretly give our jobs away.
Which causes me to pause. And think.
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Monday, October 5, 2009
The Sound of Dying
Sitting next to her bed, I can hear her breathing. I look over at a woman that vaguely resembles my grandmother. Her face has lost weight—her angular features looking even sharper in her final days of life. She stopped eating three weeks ago. She has had sips of juice and bites of ice cream, but nothing substantial. Her skin has become clammy. Her eyes are vacant. Out of kindness, one of the nursing aides has put lipstick on her. She has begun to moan. We can’t seem to discern whether this moaning is her confusion, brought on by the dementia that has plagued her for years now, or if she’s truly in pain. We can’t get comfortable in this space with her. It is too noisy. Her breaths fade in and out of being loud and quiet. When the breaths get too quiet we all hold our breath and look at her, wondering if this breath will be her last. We’ve decided this is a horrible day. One of the nurses reminds us: It is hard work to die.
I guess this is true. It is hard work to die. It is hard work to break down your body. You stop eating. You stop being hungry. You stop caring about everything else. You retreat into yourself. At some point, you just begin sleeping. And you sleep until you can’t wake up anymore. While sleeping, all these things begin to happen to your body. You get cold. Then you get feverish—like this final opportunity to sweat out what is left. Your feet begin to curl. From the bottom up, your body begins the shut-down process. Your lungs fill with fluid. You stop being able to swallow. It’s painful to watch—knowing how eminent death really is, but having no control over how and when. Eventually, your heart just stops. It gives up the battle. It’s like preparing for a trip—once everything is packed, all the lights turned off, and all the details are confirmed—you go. The hospice nurse tells us that the “spirit world” feeds her from this point forward and that she will get the energy she needs for dying from spirituality. I’m unsure about this nice, comforting thought. Right now I feel that every ounce of my energy is being ripped from me, stolen, and transferred, so that my grandmother can shut down her organs. I’m so exhausted I can’t even cry. I’m not even doing anything—just sitting. Just listening to the cacophony of noises her body is making.
I stand over her body and stroke her soft, grey hair. I whisper, “It’s okay, Grandma. It is safe for you to go. You’ll feel better.” I think about what might be happening inside her mind. They say people cross over in these final days; that they straddle both worlds—keeping one foot among the living and one among the dead. I wonder if she could communicate with her sisters and her husband Jack and her daughter Kathy. I wonder if they were calling out to her—“Boggie! Get in here! We’ve got so much to tell you!” She seems to be fighting death. I feel like my words would somehow comfort her; make it past the muck in her brain that has kept her from hearing us these last few days. No one else is believing this is possible, but I'm the ever-hopeful.
The skin on her forehead is already beginning to feel more like wax than skin. Her color has shifted drastically through the course of the day. She looks almost colorless now. I leave the room for some relief, to get out of earshot of the sound of dying. Down the hall an older woman wheels around in her wheel chair. All of the people on this floor have dementia. Visiting this floor requires patience—patience I fear I don’t have today. She wheels towards me, with a plastic baby doll in her arms, and begins the same conversation I’ve had with her three times already today. I politely smile, about to walk away and ignore her, and then I remember that this is someone else’s grandmother. So I ask her, “Do you need to know how to get to your room?” She says, “Yes. And you have beautiful teeth.” Outside of her door, she re-introduces herself to me. “I’m L.” I smile, despite my desperate urge to cry, “It was so nice to meet you, L. And your baby is beautiful.” She winks at me, “Thanks. He is my little treasure. Children, and visitors, are such a treasure.” Yes, L. They are.
It occurs to me that the staff here are saints. These men and women must have the same conversations and the same arguments everyday. Just in the last two days, I’ve already learned the routine with a few of them. You have to walk them to their rooms. You have to remind them that certain behaviors aren’t acceptable. Most of these people linger by the elevator, which can only be accessed with a code, hoping someone will take them off of this floor. They ask, “Where are we going?” and get upset when you say, “You’re staying here.” Many of them smile at you, as if you are their very own grandchild, because they don’t remember what their family looks like. That smile they have is so brief, that you don’t even have the heart to tell them that you really aren’t theirs. In twenty minutes, they won’t even remember you came in. Plus, anyone coming in is everyone’s family. There is an effective way to interact with patients with dementia—a nurturing lightness that requires empathy and patience. Dementia does horrifying things to the brain. I figure any softness they can experience with people is probably good, even though they won’t remember it.
B., a particularly sad, lost woman, wanders in circles, mostly. Her short shuffling footsteps don’t carry her far. She has been lingering outside of Grandma’s door. When I arrive at the door, I ask her, “Do you need me to take you to your room, B.?” She mutters, “Yes. What is happening in there?” I say, “Oh nothing. Margaret is just very sick.” She asks, “Oh. Do they know what’s happening in there?” “Oh, nothing B.” She asks repeatedly, “Did they figure out what’s happening in there?” I can’t help but wonder if B. can sense the death coming. They all seem to wander down here throughout the day, asking to come in, wondering what is going on. They say patients with Alzheimer’s are highly sensitive to emotions. Or maybe they just hear it. The rattling in her chest. The breaths that have become more shallow and sharp with each hour. The hospice nurse says, “There is hope in every hour with Hospice.” I'd like to hit her. I’m beginning to feel less and less hope in each hour. Hospice tries to make this experience pleasant for the family—they try to offer encouragement and advice to us as we struggle through this. I get it. But I can’t help but find myself agitated by the clichéd lines I’m being offered. I can’t help but want to throw things at these people. We aren’t stupid. Dying is hard. This is going to suck. Maybe I’ll print a brochure for Hospice to use for people like me—something that says, “The next few days are going to suck, but that’s why sweet baby Jesus invented bourbon. And cake.” Because the truth, is dying is hard work. For all of us.
I guess this is true. It is hard work to die. It is hard work to break down your body. You stop eating. You stop being hungry. You stop caring about everything else. You retreat into yourself. At some point, you just begin sleeping. And you sleep until you can’t wake up anymore. While sleeping, all these things begin to happen to your body. You get cold. Then you get feverish—like this final opportunity to sweat out what is left. Your feet begin to curl. From the bottom up, your body begins the shut-down process. Your lungs fill with fluid. You stop being able to swallow. It’s painful to watch—knowing how eminent death really is, but having no control over how and when. Eventually, your heart just stops. It gives up the battle. It’s like preparing for a trip—once everything is packed, all the lights turned off, and all the details are confirmed—you go. The hospice nurse tells us that the “spirit world” feeds her from this point forward and that she will get the energy she needs for dying from spirituality. I’m unsure about this nice, comforting thought. Right now I feel that every ounce of my energy is being ripped from me, stolen, and transferred, so that my grandmother can shut down her organs. I’m so exhausted I can’t even cry. I’m not even doing anything—just sitting. Just listening to the cacophony of noises her body is making.
I stand over her body and stroke her soft, grey hair. I whisper, “It’s okay, Grandma. It is safe for you to go. You’ll feel better.” I think about what might be happening inside her mind. They say people cross over in these final days; that they straddle both worlds—keeping one foot among the living and one among the dead. I wonder if she could communicate with her sisters and her husband Jack and her daughter Kathy. I wonder if they were calling out to her—“Boggie! Get in here! We’ve got so much to tell you!” She seems to be fighting death. I feel like my words would somehow comfort her; make it past the muck in her brain that has kept her from hearing us these last few days. No one else is believing this is possible, but I'm the ever-hopeful.
The skin on her forehead is already beginning to feel more like wax than skin. Her color has shifted drastically through the course of the day. She looks almost colorless now. I leave the room for some relief, to get out of earshot of the sound of dying. Down the hall an older woman wheels around in her wheel chair. All of the people on this floor have dementia. Visiting this floor requires patience—patience I fear I don’t have today. She wheels towards me, with a plastic baby doll in her arms, and begins the same conversation I’ve had with her three times already today. I politely smile, about to walk away and ignore her, and then I remember that this is someone else’s grandmother. So I ask her, “Do you need to know how to get to your room?” She says, “Yes. And you have beautiful teeth.” Outside of her door, she re-introduces herself to me. “I’m L.” I smile, despite my desperate urge to cry, “It was so nice to meet you, L. And your baby is beautiful.” She winks at me, “Thanks. He is my little treasure. Children, and visitors, are such a treasure.” Yes, L. They are.
It occurs to me that the staff here are saints. These men and women must have the same conversations and the same arguments everyday. Just in the last two days, I’ve already learned the routine with a few of them. You have to walk them to their rooms. You have to remind them that certain behaviors aren’t acceptable. Most of these people linger by the elevator, which can only be accessed with a code, hoping someone will take them off of this floor. They ask, “Where are we going?” and get upset when you say, “You’re staying here.” Many of them smile at you, as if you are their very own grandchild, because they don’t remember what their family looks like. That smile they have is so brief, that you don’t even have the heart to tell them that you really aren’t theirs. In twenty minutes, they won’t even remember you came in. Plus, anyone coming in is everyone’s family. There is an effective way to interact with patients with dementia—a nurturing lightness that requires empathy and patience. Dementia does horrifying things to the brain. I figure any softness they can experience with people is probably good, even though they won’t remember it.
B., a particularly sad, lost woman, wanders in circles, mostly. Her short shuffling footsteps don’t carry her far. She has been lingering outside of Grandma’s door. When I arrive at the door, I ask her, “Do you need me to take you to your room, B.?” She mutters, “Yes. What is happening in there?” I say, “Oh nothing. Margaret is just very sick.” She asks, “Oh. Do they know what’s happening in there?” “Oh, nothing B.” She asks repeatedly, “Did they figure out what’s happening in there?” I can’t help but wonder if B. can sense the death coming. They all seem to wander down here throughout the day, asking to come in, wondering what is going on. They say patients with Alzheimer’s are highly sensitive to emotions. Or maybe they just hear it. The rattling in her chest. The breaths that have become more shallow and sharp with each hour. The hospice nurse says, “There is hope in every hour with Hospice.” I'd like to hit her. I’m beginning to feel less and less hope in each hour. Hospice tries to make this experience pleasant for the family—they try to offer encouragement and advice to us as we struggle through this. I get it. But I can’t help but find myself agitated by the clichéd lines I’m being offered. I can’t help but want to throw things at these people. We aren’t stupid. Dying is hard. This is going to suck. Maybe I’ll print a brochure for Hospice to use for people like me—something that says, “The next few days are going to suck, but that’s why sweet baby Jesus invented bourbon. And cake.” Because the truth, is dying is hard work. For all of us.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Bees are Stuck in my Aortic Valve
It is 4 am. I wake up with a jolt. In my dream, a man pulls up into my childhood driveway. He gets out of the car with a gun. We lock eyes. I can’t seem to shut the back door. My mother is in the other room with one of my childhood friend’s babies. Strangely, this is a baby I’ve never even met—I’ve only seen pictures of her on Facebook. I’m afraid this man will come in the door. I’m on the phone with the police, reporting a suspected robbery down the street. For some reason, I hang up. Strange assortments of people are streaming through my living room. I can’t seem to get anyone to run out the front door. I’m so scared, I wake up, terrified of what will happen next.
I thought nightmares ended with childhood—wrapping up at right about the same time as when my chubby cheeks lost their charm and canned Spaghetti-O’s became unacceptable as a dinner option. But here they are, still speckling my REM cycles. Although I suppose nightmares have just become scarier, more real, now that I’m all grown up. Instead of dreaming about evil clowns and monsters under the bed (not that I ever had those nightmares), I dream about things that really haunt me. I dream about heavy things like death, deceit, and money. I’ve been working in an intensely poor urban environment now for almost five years. I confront evils on a daily basis that are darker than dark. I also watch too much television. And I eat a lot of spicy food. I’ve heard these things are interconnected.
For weeks now I’ve been having horrible dreams. I’ve been dreaming so vividly that I often wake up exhausted, feeling as though I’ve been up all night, acting in a play to a sold-out audience. My poor roommate has had to sit through weeks of my early morning rumblings of how bizarre my last dream was, who was in it (and where did they come from?), and my constant ponderings about what the underlying message is to all this active fantasy.
I can’t seem to help it. I’m sitting on heavy words. My grandmother is dying. These are hard words to say out loud. Words that tumble around in my mouth and brain like that game in the pediatrician’s waiting room—the giant maze of colorful wires with wooden beads, twisted and twirled around like a rollercoaster. It is a bizarre feeling knowing that you must say goodbye to someone—someone who has always been around in your life. Someone who taught you important things about yourself; who challenged you to be bigger and better than what you thought you could ever be.
I used to spend my summers in Florida. Grandma Boggie and Grandpa Jack were just about the best set of grandparents a kid could ask for—we went to the beach, we went to the mall, we watched The Golden Girls and The Price is Right (and lots and lots of soaps), and I got the opportunity to participate in the active lives of two amazing seniors. My developmental psychology textbooks all tell me this “intergenerational exchange” is extremely beneficial to the development of children. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with older people doesn’t need a textbook to tell them this. We helped with Meals on Wheels. We volunteered at church. We walked dogs. We read National Geographic. We baked cookies. My grandma taught me how to cook. My grandpa taught me the art of sarcasm. We laughed a lot.
But my fondest memories are of playing Scrabble. Grandma Boggie was an avid Scrabbler. She had the version of the game that twirled around on a table. We would climb into her, what felt like giant, full-size four-post bed and sink into crisp light blue sheets with eyelet trim. She would place the board in between us. I would run my little fingers over those square indentations, just perfectly ridged to hold my pathetic 3-letter monosyllabic word, dreaming that someday I’d have my very own Deluxe Scrabble, if I was lucky. I’d spend hours reading the scrabble dictionary—trying to force words into my vocabulary that I’d never remember to use when the time actually came to put my word down on the board. Every word I put down was a victory won. She taught me to love words. Even simple, stupid words. Especially two-letter, high-scoring words placed on a triple word score. Plus, she let me make up a few of my own rules. I guess she had her own rules, too.
Over the years I learned a lot from these two people. I spent a lot of time with them—asking tender questions about the world and trying to figure out just how exactly it all worked. I’m sure I challenged them—this loud-mouthed curly-headed baby from North Carolina. I was so confident and full of energy. But I was, and am, just like my mother. Except a bit more “out of the box” and bizarre—qualities I’ve happily taken from my father. So perhaps it was more of a review for them. A chance to spend quality time with a child, a generation removed, that was just like one of the children they had already raised.
When Grandpa Jack died, now almost eight years ago, I thought my world had stopped. The news crushed me. He had been such an amazing grandfather to me—I was desperately trying to figure out how I’d go on without his jokes. Without his commentary. I loved my Grandpa Jack. I know that no one is perfect, and Grandpa Jack’s life was living proof of this fact, but from my small, freckled vantage point, he was perfection. He was silly and smart and full of great ideas. I guess now I realize he was a Republican, but I feel sure he would have changed his mind for me. I could have bribed him to vote for Obama with a sweet smile, a good story, and a double scotch on the rocks (“light on the rocks”, as he used to say). I was heartbroken when he passed, although it was at the end of a long battle of illnesses and strokes. This, coupled with the death of a close friend from high school at about the same time, and I thought my life would never be the same. And I guess, in truth, it wasn’t. Nothing ever remains the same. All these years later, I still miss him dearly. But it doesn’t hurt as bad as it did that first year. And so much has changed. I was just a kid.
Grief has this funny effect. It’s like this heavy lead jacket. You walk through your day as if you’re on your way to get an x-ray, all day long. Occasionally you sit down, and the weight seems to temporarily disappear, but soon you feel it creep back into your bones. And after some time, after walking around feeling heavy for what feels like an eternity, you heal. You recover. Sometimes you still feel that deep heaviness—like the floors are sinking in. Like a man is pulling up in your driveway with a gun in his hand. But most of the time you’re okay. You remember the people you’ve lost in small bits—the way someone flips through their hair or a small smirk on a face. These are the happy moments through which you remember the people you’ve loved and lost. It is hard to make that compromise. Knowing how much you love someone, knowing they’re dying, and knowing that at some point in the near future their memory will melt into tender moments that are brief, albeit touching.
Over the last few years, we’ve slowly said goodbye to her. As her memory has slipped, it is has become harder and harder to call her Grandma. She isn’t the woman I spent summers with. She isn’t the woman who taught me to always serve blueberry muffins with chicken salad. She isn’t the woman who could never remember if the dog was a girl or a boy. Her body is there. She still looks the same, for the most part. She just turned 90 years old. 90 years and four children later, it is remarkable that she still has any semblance of that young girl from Arkansas that my Grandfather fell so passionately in love with so many years ago. She still has the same voice, although the sound has become disconnected. This disease, Alzheimer’s disease, took her away from us a long time ago. It’s like the words are all still floating around in her brain and she struggles to grab them—to pull them down and put them into a sentence. What comes out seems artificial, strained, lost. Like her brain has become one of those prize machines in the arcade that you pump quarters into constantly and rarely come out with a prize. The grabbing mechanism is flawed, intentionally, and you think you’re getting this awesome new stuffed animal and it almost always slips through the claw in the retrieval process. How frustrating this must be. How uniquely inhuman she must feel.
I still smell her sometimes. I catch a whiff of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door and I’m taken back to sitting at her vanity table, my little tan legs dangling wildly from the stool, rummaging through a drawer of twenty tubes of the same red lipstick. I can smell her powder. She’d be getting dressed for some occasion at the church—someone’s retirement party or anniversary. She had about four dresses she cycled through. Today she might choose the pink one with the big bow around the neck, worn always with a smart shoe. I’d play with her old wedge heels from the 60’s and 70’s and she’d gawk that she once wore such frivolous things. She never really let me get too carried away, always insisting that I remain appropriate—she fiercely held on to this idea of “appropriate”; decorously holding fast to some nameless tradition, which I of course felt was archaic. We fondly referred to it as her living testimony that she was indeed from the “fallen down aristocracy of Arkansas”. In reality, I think it was her attempt at creating order, despite our collective chaos. Today I relish in this decorum. I live by many of the standards she stated as fact back in those days and try hard to channel that dignified sense of propriety (perhaps a Southern trait?) she infused into so many elements of her life.
The memories are so real, so vivid, like my recent habanera-induced dreams. So it seems weird that over the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with saying goodbye. I have her, the grandma I want to remember, right here in my memory bank. I could spend hours telling stories. Going through pictures. Remembering her. I know, in my heart of hearts, that she has lived an amazing course. She has had unbelievable highs and unmentionable lows. She has survived 90 years of this world—this crazy, mixed-up, upside-down world. And I feel as though I’ve said goodbye one hundred times now. I’ve waited, with bated breath, these last few years for the phone call that would relay this sinking news. When I finally got that phone call, I didn’t react the way I thought I would. It struck me in such a strange place in my heart, I almost felt stung. Like a hornet had somehow weaseled its way into my bloodstream and was passing through my pulmonary trunk (does that even pass things?). It hurts. And I’m scared. I’m unsure about what will happen next. Like bees are stuck in my aortic valve.
I thought nightmares ended with childhood—wrapping up at right about the same time as when my chubby cheeks lost their charm and canned Spaghetti-O’s became unacceptable as a dinner option. But here they are, still speckling my REM cycles. Although I suppose nightmares have just become scarier, more real, now that I’m all grown up. Instead of dreaming about evil clowns and monsters under the bed (not that I ever had those nightmares), I dream about things that really haunt me. I dream about heavy things like death, deceit, and money. I’ve been working in an intensely poor urban environment now for almost five years. I confront evils on a daily basis that are darker than dark. I also watch too much television. And I eat a lot of spicy food. I’ve heard these things are interconnected.
For weeks now I’ve been having horrible dreams. I’ve been dreaming so vividly that I often wake up exhausted, feeling as though I’ve been up all night, acting in a play to a sold-out audience. My poor roommate has had to sit through weeks of my early morning rumblings of how bizarre my last dream was, who was in it (and where did they come from?), and my constant ponderings about what the underlying message is to all this active fantasy.
I can’t seem to help it. I’m sitting on heavy words. My grandmother is dying. These are hard words to say out loud. Words that tumble around in my mouth and brain like that game in the pediatrician’s waiting room—the giant maze of colorful wires with wooden beads, twisted and twirled around like a rollercoaster. It is a bizarre feeling knowing that you must say goodbye to someone—someone who has always been around in your life. Someone who taught you important things about yourself; who challenged you to be bigger and better than what you thought you could ever be.
I used to spend my summers in Florida. Grandma Boggie and Grandpa Jack were just about the best set of grandparents a kid could ask for—we went to the beach, we went to the mall, we watched The Golden Girls and The Price is Right (and lots and lots of soaps), and I got the opportunity to participate in the active lives of two amazing seniors. My developmental psychology textbooks all tell me this “intergenerational exchange” is extremely beneficial to the development of children. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with older people doesn’t need a textbook to tell them this. We helped with Meals on Wheels. We volunteered at church. We walked dogs. We read National Geographic. We baked cookies. My grandma taught me how to cook. My grandpa taught me the art of sarcasm. We laughed a lot.
But my fondest memories are of playing Scrabble. Grandma Boggie was an avid Scrabbler. She had the version of the game that twirled around on a table. We would climb into her, what felt like giant, full-size four-post bed and sink into crisp light blue sheets with eyelet trim. She would place the board in between us. I would run my little fingers over those square indentations, just perfectly ridged to hold my pathetic 3-letter monosyllabic word, dreaming that someday I’d have my very own Deluxe Scrabble, if I was lucky. I’d spend hours reading the scrabble dictionary—trying to force words into my vocabulary that I’d never remember to use when the time actually came to put my word down on the board. Every word I put down was a victory won. She taught me to love words. Even simple, stupid words. Especially two-letter, high-scoring words placed on a triple word score. Plus, she let me make up a few of my own rules. I guess she had her own rules, too.
Over the years I learned a lot from these two people. I spent a lot of time with them—asking tender questions about the world and trying to figure out just how exactly it all worked. I’m sure I challenged them—this loud-mouthed curly-headed baby from North Carolina. I was so confident and full of energy. But I was, and am, just like my mother. Except a bit more “out of the box” and bizarre—qualities I’ve happily taken from my father. So perhaps it was more of a review for them. A chance to spend quality time with a child, a generation removed, that was just like one of the children they had already raised.
When Grandpa Jack died, now almost eight years ago, I thought my world had stopped. The news crushed me. He had been such an amazing grandfather to me—I was desperately trying to figure out how I’d go on without his jokes. Without his commentary. I loved my Grandpa Jack. I know that no one is perfect, and Grandpa Jack’s life was living proof of this fact, but from my small, freckled vantage point, he was perfection. He was silly and smart and full of great ideas. I guess now I realize he was a Republican, but I feel sure he would have changed his mind for me. I could have bribed him to vote for Obama with a sweet smile, a good story, and a double scotch on the rocks (“light on the rocks”, as he used to say). I was heartbroken when he passed, although it was at the end of a long battle of illnesses and strokes. This, coupled with the death of a close friend from high school at about the same time, and I thought my life would never be the same. And I guess, in truth, it wasn’t. Nothing ever remains the same. All these years later, I still miss him dearly. But it doesn’t hurt as bad as it did that first year. And so much has changed. I was just a kid.
Grief has this funny effect. It’s like this heavy lead jacket. You walk through your day as if you’re on your way to get an x-ray, all day long. Occasionally you sit down, and the weight seems to temporarily disappear, but soon you feel it creep back into your bones. And after some time, after walking around feeling heavy for what feels like an eternity, you heal. You recover. Sometimes you still feel that deep heaviness—like the floors are sinking in. Like a man is pulling up in your driveway with a gun in his hand. But most of the time you’re okay. You remember the people you’ve lost in small bits—the way someone flips through their hair or a small smirk on a face. These are the happy moments through which you remember the people you’ve loved and lost. It is hard to make that compromise. Knowing how much you love someone, knowing they’re dying, and knowing that at some point in the near future their memory will melt into tender moments that are brief, albeit touching.
Over the last few years, we’ve slowly said goodbye to her. As her memory has slipped, it is has become harder and harder to call her Grandma. She isn’t the woman I spent summers with. She isn’t the woman who taught me to always serve blueberry muffins with chicken salad. She isn’t the woman who could never remember if the dog was a girl or a boy. Her body is there. She still looks the same, for the most part. She just turned 90 years old. 90 years and four children later, it is remarkable that she still has any semblance of that young girl from Arkansas that my Grandfather fell so passionately in love with so many years ago. She still has the same voice, although the sound has become disconnected. This disease, Alzheimer’s disease, took her away from us a long time ago. It’s like the words are all still floating around in her brain and she struggles to grab them—to pull them down and put them into a sentence. What comes out seems artificial, strained, lost. Like her brain has become one of those prize machines in the arcade that you pump quarters into constantly and rarely come out with a prize. The grabbing mechanism is flawed, intentionally, and you think you’re getting this awesome new stuffed animal and it almost always slips through the claw in the retrieval process. How frustrating this must be. How uniquely inhuman she must feel.
I still smell her sometimes. I catch a whiff of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door and I’m taken back to sitting at her vanity table, my little tan legs dangling wildly from the stool, rummaging through a drawer of twenty tubes of the same red lipstick. I can smell her powder. She’d be getting dressed for some occasion at the church—someone’s retirement party or anniversary. She had about four dresses she cycled through. Today she might choose the pink one with the big bow around the neck, worn always with a smart shoe. I’d play with her old wedge heels from the 60’s and 70’s and she’d gawk that she once wore such frivolous things. She never really let me get too carried away, always insisting that I remain appropriate—she fiercely held on to this idea of “appropriate”; decorously holding fast to some nameless tradition, which I of course felt was archaic. We fondly referred to it as her living testimony that she was indeed from the “fallen down aristocracy of Arkansas”. In reality, I think it was her attempt at creating order, despite our collective chaos. Today I relish in this decorum. I live by many of the standards she stated as fact back in those days and try hard to channel that dignified sense of propriety (perhaps a Southern trait?) she infused into so many elements of her life.
The memories are so real, so vivid, like my recent habanera-induced dreams. So it seems weird that over the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with saying goodbye. I have her, the grandma I want to remember, right here in my memory bank. I could spend hours telling stories. Going through pictures. Remembering her. I know, in my heart of hearts, that she has lived an amazing course. She has had unbelievable highs and unmentionable lows. She has survived 90 years of this world—this crazy, mixed-up, upside-down world. And I feel as though I’ve said goodbye one hundred times now. I’ve waited, with bated breath, these last few years for the phone call that would relay this sinking news. When I finally got that phone call, I didn’t react the way I thought I would. It struck me in such a strange place in my heart, I almost felt stung. Like a hornet had somehow weaseled its way into my bloodstream and was passing through my pulmonary trunk (does that even pass things?). It hurts. And I’m scared. I’m unsure about what will happen next. Like bees are stuck in my aortic valve.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)